Ch 51 of TDT - Gansey's POV
by DominiqueMorgenstern
Summary: Blue and Gansey go up to the mountains in the Camaro after she breaks up with Adam; from Gansey's imagined POV.


She shut the car door, and looked steadfastly at the dashboard. "What happened, Jane?"

It had just slipped out, but his facetious tone was dissonant with the terrible, drawn expression hung over her face.

She said, without inflection, "Adam and I fought. I told him. I don't want to talk about it."

He silently put it in the clutch, and slid the gear into first. Ronan really had done a magnificent job, Gansey mused; just before the gear stick went in, it grinded ever so slightly, as it always did. He said, "Do you want to talk at all?"

"Only if it isn't about him."

"Do you know where you want to go?"

"Some place that isn't here."

He felt his hands shake slightly. He was glad of something solid to hold onto, so she wouldn't see his nervousness. The warmth wafting feebly through the heaters, heady with the scent of leather, petrol, accented with the faint floral scent coming from Blue, clogged the air between them with unsaid, unspeakable things: Adam. He channelled it all through his right foot, pressing the pig for more speed as he wound the car up narrow roads, leading up the mountains, higher into the air. Meanwhile, he regaled her with the story of Ronan and Kavsinky. To that, she said nothing at all.

Next he told her about the party. He remembered how he'd gone out to call her, desperate to hear her voice, that Henrietta accent, that siren call of _home _that twisted his gut and soothed him at the same time. He wondered if he was now doing the same for her now.

He looked over. She'd pulled her legs up onto the seat, wrapped her arms around them, resting her cheek against her knee. He thought that some of the sadness in her expression had cleared.

He was running out of anecdotes to occupy her with. He told her about Malory—about the pigeons; about Helen.

Then he had nothing.

"Ok." She said dully. "You can talk about him now."

He sighed with heavy relief. "Oh, Jane. If you'd been there when we got the call about him walking on the interstate, you would've..." He trailed off, suddenly thinking, _I don't know what she would have done. _And then his mind was staging an invented Blue-Adam fight scene, panning the camera, angling from above, wondering who had said what, who had moved away first. They were like puppets, he couldn't imagine it right. He didn't know the specifics of the deterioration of their relationship, and he didn't want to find out. He smote every hint of joy he felt flaring up despicably in himself because of it.

In the last few months, his and Adam's relationship had changed unknowably, and he wondered if Blue's influence was the cause of it. If it was Blue that given him that push, turned him so martyred, so hell-bent on doing things the right, goddamned hard way. But no, he thought, that had always been lurking in Adam. Or was it Cabeswater that had unleashed this new rawness in him? And then there was Ronan. _Ronan, _he thought heavily.

He wondered if the real problem was this: that everything, everyone was changing, and he was not. He was a lifeless emblem, a cast-off statue in the sea, letting the waves storm over him, unblinking, unchanging; without those strange gifts that marked out all his friends, he was paralysed and he was powerless. _Semper eadem. _"Ha! Adam's communing with trees and Noah keeps re-enacting being murdered and Ronan's wrecking and then making me new cars. What's new with you? Something terrible, I trust?"

"You know me," She muttered. "Ever sensible."

He grinned. It was strange, he thought, that it was Blue, out of everyone, who was a pillar of ordinariness right now. "Like myself. A creature of simple delights."

She laughed. It was short, but it was a deep and earnest sound. Giddiness rushed through him. _I-made-her-laugh, I-made-her-laugh._

She reached out her hand, fingering the radio knob, but she didn't turn it. Gansey felt oddly disappointed. She said, "I feel terrible about what I said to him."

He cringed away from the dutiful response: _what did you say to him? _This was what he'd been dreading; this polite degeneration into relationship counselling. He would have to say, _And why do you feel that way about Adam, Jane? _And then she would look at him, with _those _eyes, blushes unfurling in her cheeks. He would have to watch her flounder whilst they both pretended they didn't know what the other was thinking. Instead, he steered the conversation down another path. "Adam has killed himself for Aglionby. And for what? Education?"

"Not just that," Blue said. "Prestige? Opportunity?"

"But maybe he never had the chance." This was a thought that had occurred to Gansey often, in those days before Blue came along. Then he wondered when he'd started thinking of Blue as a turning point. "Maybe success is in your genes," he finished.

In his periphery, Blue's face scrunched up distastefully, turning to look out the window. "This really isn't a conversation I feel like having right now."

Gansey was puzzled. "What?" Had he offended her? Then he realised—"Oh—that is _not _what I meant. I mean that I'm rich—"

Her voice was firm. _"Not. Helping._"

"I'm rich _in support. _So are you. You grew up loved, didn't you?"

She nodded; he was immensely relieved. "Me too. I never doubted it. I never even thought to doubt it. And even Ronan grew up with that, too, back when it mattered, when he was becoming the person the person he was. The age of reason, or whatever. I wish you could you have met him before. But growing up being told you can do anything...I used to think, before I met you, that it _was _about the money. Like, I thought Adam's family was too poor for love."

The moment he'd finished, he knew he was in for it. She said, "Oh, but since _we're _poor, but happy—the cheerful peasants—"

"Don't, _please, _Jane," Gansey begged. _I don't want to fight with you_. He appealed, "You know what I mean. I'm telling you I was stupid over it. I thought it was about trying so hard to survive that you didn't have time to be a good parent. Obviously, that's not it. Because you and I, we're both...wealthy in love."

"I suppose," She said glumly, "But that's not going to get me into community college."

He repeated, "Community college!" The astonishment was embarrassingly audible in his voice. He was struck by how back to front it was. Someone like Blue, who had helped them so much, who was so bright, had so much potential, was confined to rise no further than mediocrity. And for what? She wouldn't be accepted into Aglionby because having a dick was more important than having brains. And she wouldn't be accepted into a good college because she didn't have the money. "Surely you can get scholarships?"

"They don't cover books."

"That's only a few hundred dollars a semester, right?"

He'd done it again. She shifted in her seat, turning to face him, jaw set. "Just how much do you think I make at a shift in Nino's, Gansey?"

"Don't they make grants to cover that?" He replied, hoping to mollify her.

She inhaled sharply. "Either I'm an idiot or not, Gansey—make up your mind! Either I'm clever enough to have researched this myself and be eligible for a scholarship, or I am too stupid to have considered the options and I can't get a scholarship anyway!"

His voice eventually emerged, quiet and chastised, "Please don't be angry."

She looked at him a moment longer, and then relaxed against the seat. "Sorry."

"Jesus," he said fervently, "I wish this week were over."

Blue seemed to sense what he was thinking about. "Did you ever meet his parents?"

Instantly an image of Robert Parrish, alongside his timid wife, see-through, squalid shapes, appeared in his mind. "I _hate _them." Gansey vowed. Again, he marvelled how a boy like _Adam, _so infinitely more worthy, so immeasurably _better,_ could have sprung from such pitiable, depthless, mean people. Gansey could barely imagine how Adam had survived. "The bruises he'd come to school with. Who has he ever had to love him? Ever?"

A cool silence washed over them, Gansey's words suspended in the air between them like a hardening wall of ice.

"Look there." Blue said.

Gansey followed her gaze, out of his window. He pulled over, turning off the ignition.

The valley stretched out below them from where they were on the mountain, yawning and ocean-wide, bastioned by towering, jagged night-black mountains on the other side of the valley. Curled snugly at the base of the mountains was Henrietta itself, lit with yellow and white lights. High, high above, a galaxy of stars already flickered in the crystal-clear, bluish black sky.

He stared, awe-struck, and thought, _I will never be able to leave this place. This is my heart. Even if they all drift, I will remain. I alone._

"What are you thinking?" Blue murmured, her voice low and silken.

"I've been all the world. More than one country for every year that I'm alive. Europe and South America and—the highest mountains and the widest rivers and the prettiest villages. I'm not saying that to show off. I'm just saying it because I'm trying to understand how I could have been so many places and yet this is the only place that feels like home. This is the only place I _belong. _And because I'm trying to understand how, if I belong here, it..."

"—hurts so much," Blue finished.

He turned to look at her, and his body flooded with heat. She knew. _Of course she does_, Gansey thought. _Who else? _He nodded. In that moment, he couldn't deny it, the almost physical _tugging _sensation in his stomach, this joining, this yearning, between them.

_Adam,_ he thought.

She said, "If you find out will you tell me?"

"I don't know," Gansey ruminated, "Whether we're meant to find out."

"Oh, we're finding out. If you're not going to, I'll do it myself."

"If you find out first, will you tell _me_?"

"Sure thing,"

In the weak light of the car, her profile was smoothed out by the darkness surrounding them, but Gansey could see with scintillating clarity the shadow of her eyelashes, the line of her nose, the grim curve of her lips, her chin, her neck. On the edge of this mountain, they'd trespassed somewhere, unattached to the rest of the world, and he didn't know how to find his way back. He didn't know if he wanted to. If he leant over to her now, stooped with guilt and wanting, he knew she would take him, unafraid. Then he was saying, "Jane," his throat, thick and tight, "In this light, you..." _No, _he panicked, scrambling for some rationality. All he could think was, _Adam. Adam. Adam. What are you _doing? _"Jesus. _Jesus. I've got to get my head straight."

Violently, he threw open the car door, grabbing the roof to haul himself out faster; he stumbled away, unable to keep upright until he grabbed the boot of the car, catching his breath, one hand pulling at his hair.

He folded his arms across his chest, staring at the ground. Think about something else, he told himself. Tried; failed. He tried something different. _This happens all the time, this sort of...thing...just ignore it; it's all in your head, it'll go away...But it won't go, I know it won't go. _He told himself furiously, _you've fucked it you've fucked it you've fucked it—_

The Camaro's car door slammed. He heard her footsteps approaching him. He involuntarily tensed as she stood against the car beside him. He didn't move. "I'm sorry," He said, "That was very rude."

She was silent. Then her palm was suddenly against his neck, just below his jaw. Her fingers were spreading, caressing. _Don't—_

But he'd already closed his eyes, gratefully leaning into her touch.

He almost told her, _please don't stop_. He lifted the hand that was plastered against his neck, and held it aloft for a moment. Bringing it to his mouth, he remembered that this was forbidden. And that, in acknowledging it was so, Gansey condemned himself, and her, to a lifetime of suffering this emptiness, this near-touching; his broken lips hovering, grazing over the warm skin on the back of her hand, hardly breathing, desperately trying to stop himself. It seemed absurd that, just by kissing the back of her hand, so chastely, so harmlessly, he could die. He looked up. "I know," he said. "I wouldn't." He lowered her hand.

Her voice was a breathy sound. "Thanks for remembering."

Gansey looked away, back over the valley, and thought about how this had all begun. "Oh, Jane,"

"Oh, Jane, what?"

"He didn't want me to, did you know?" He remembered sitting down in the booth that day, Adam's eyes shadowed, shyly trained ahead; him following his gaze, locking on the figure of the waitress. "He told me not to try and get you to come to the table that night at Nino's, I had to talk _him _into it. And then I made such an idiot of myself—" He turned to her, and said, "What are you _thinking_?"

She looked away into the valley. Her voice steadier, he dreaded the recollections he could see taking place in her head. "I thought you were an asshole."

He wanted to wince. "Thank God for the past tense." He wanted to say so many things, but all he could say was, "I can't—we can't do this to him."

"I'm not a _thing. _To have."

Gansey was stumped; he seemed to have made yet another blunder, and he had no idea how. He thought tiredly, _perhaps it's my breathing that offends._ "No. Jesus. Of course you're not. But you know what I mean."

Somehow, he wrestled the words out into the open. "I wish you could be kissed, Jane. Because I would beg just one off you. Under all this." He gestured widely around him, to his home, to the stars. "And then we'd never say anything about it again."

Then she said the worst thing she could possibly have said. "We can pretend. Just once. And then we'll never say anything about it again."

All conscious thought annihilated, his body turned, yielding, offering himself to her. Fearlessly, she reached up to link her arms around his neck. He leaned down, and pressed his cheek to hers. Her skin was unbelievably soft and fragrant. His heart throbbed, slick and slow, heat smouldering under his skin, teetering on the verge of frenzy. It all felt so dangerously _right. _He closed his eyes dizzily, his hitched breath spreading over her face. He put his hands gently on her back. She was rigid beneath him. It seared away his conscience, his thoughts down to a mire of carnality. Then he felt her lips on his jaw, trailing along...A trickle of invigorating warmth ran down to the pit of his stomach. He felt sick with it. He couldn't endure it any longer.

He pulled away, took a sharp breath, and lied to the air resolutely, "And now we never speak of it again."


End file.
